Wednesday, 8 March 2017

Is recruiter bias sabotaging your hiring process? Part 2

When recruiting
candidates, unconscious bias can sneak in unnoticed, which can mean you
overlook great candidates. Here’s Part Two in our four-part series.

The human mind is an incredible tool,
capable of a vast array of tricks – some deliberate, others not.

Before we continue, ask yourself this: have
you already reached a conclusion as to whether or not this blog will shed any
insight into your recruitment process? Are you reading this to mine for
inconsistencies, flaws; details to support your conclusion?

No? Are you sure?

Great!

If the answer was yes, don’t be too hard on
yourself – you are only human, after all.

…Even though you’ve got that conspicuous
rose tattoo poking out from underneath your sleeve. But more on that later.

Number
2 – Heuristic

Admittedly it’s not the most familiar of
terms, but this type of recruiter bias is alarming in its simplicity.

As a human being, you’ll have all sorts of
pre-conceived rules based on either your personal experience, societal
expectations, or a combination of both. For example, imagine that a friend
brings a bottle of wine to your house. You take it to put it in the fridge and
on the way, catch sight of its $4.99 price tag. You might instinctively decide
that it’s not going to be a particularly nice drop.

And you might be right. But not
necessarily. A cheap bottle of wine can be a nasty one – but, and here’s the
kicker, not every cheap bottle of wine is going to be nasty. Welcome to
heuristics.

So how does this come into play when recruiting
candidates?

Remember we mentioned your tattoo? Imagine
that you’re our candidate, and we’ve already formed a heuristic (preconceived
rule) that suggests that tattooed candidates make bad hires. We might not even
realise that that’s how we feel. But that’s beside the point; rather than
giving you a fair go, we’ve already made a judgement before you’ve even had a
chance to prove yourself. Whatever your resume says suddenly becomes
irrelevant.

It’s not really fair, is it.

I know that as an HR Professional, you do
your best to give your candidates the best shot at advancing their careers. If
you didn’t like people, you’d be in a different job. So how do you stop
heuristics creeping in?

The best solution here is to adopt a
two-pronged approach.

Firstly, we use data before we hire at
every possible opportunity. After all, it’s harder to argue with cold, hard
facts. For example, find out how many years’ experience X had in the role. Ask
her referees to rate her competencies on a scale of 1 to 10. Record
conversations with interviewees or referees. Take transcripts if at all
possible. Rather than relying on ‘getting a vibe,’ use online recruitment
tools, and organise personality profiling or aptitude testing as your second
opinion.

Secondly, we attempt to identify our own
heuristics, and the points in the recruitment process at which they’d have the
opportunity to emerge. We then delay those points until we are as far down the
fact-finding road as possible. When we finally come to meeting our candidates
face-to-face, whether or not they have tattoos, for example, is less likely to
affect our decision to hire than it would have should that information been
available to us earlier.

Of course, like many problems, the majority
of the work is already done when you manage to isolate the issue at play – so
if you’re able to identify snap judgements you’re making as they happen, you’ll
be two steps ahead of the game.

Good luck, and happy recruiting!

But don’t get too comfortable – Bias # 3 is
just around the corner.

Need
an unbiased opinion? Our skills and aptitude tests can help. Have a look here: http://talentpropeller.com.au/skills-testing